Research Description

My work is concerned with subjectivity and power and draws on close to 25 years of work in Guatemala (over seven years in country). Specifically, I try to understand how complex social formations like nationalism, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intersect with violence and the state to produce people’s senses of identity. I began working in Guatemala in 1985 in the midst of the civil war. Since then I have studied the causes and effects of that war and what genocide means on the ground to those who survived it. This has led to my long-standing interest in new social movements, like the pan-Mayan ethnic revitalization project, that have emerged in the wake of the war. I draw on theoretical frameworks inspired by feminist and post-colonial thinkers who urge careful consideration of the relations between power and knowledge in view of unequal global power relations. Because so much of what I study addresses the role of the body, how it is understood as “raced” or gendered, and how different entities—from liberation movements to military states—try to control it, I have been influenced by thinking on biopolitics (the production and care for life itself), in relation to necro-politics (the production and uses of death). The body is experienced by each individual in culturally specific ways, but it is also lived as part of larger imaginaries that are impacted by the media, understandings of science and technology, and popular culture, so my work also draws on cultural studies and medical anthropology.

Selected Publications

Publication Description

Following the 1996 treaty ending decades of civil war, how are Guatemalans reckoning with genocide and with the fact that almost everyone collaborated in some way with the violence? Meaning “to count, figure up” and “to settle rewards and punishments,” reckoning promises accounting and accountability. Yet Diane Nelson shows that the means by which the war was waged, especially its raced and gendered modes, unsettle the very premises of knowing and being. Symptomatic are the stories of duplicity and living with “two faces” pervasive in post-war Guatemala and applied to the left, Mayan people, and the state. Drawing on over twenty years of research in Guatemala, Nelson explores how postwar struggles to reckon traumatic experience illuminate the assumptions of identity more generally.
Nelson lashes together stories of human rights activism, Mayan identity struggles, forced-voluntary participation in massacres, and popular enjoyments like traditional dances, horror films, and carnivals, with exhumations of mass graves, official apologies, and reparations. She discusses the stereotype of the Two-Faced Indian as colonial discourse revivified by anti-guerrilla counterinsurgency and by the claims of duplicity leveled against Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, as well as functioning as a survival strategy for some. Nelson examines suspicions that state power is also two-faced, from the left’s fears of a clandestine para-state behind the democratic façade to the right’s conviction that NGOs threaten Guatemalan sovereignty. Comparing anti-malaria and anti-subversive campaigns suggests biopolitical ways the state is two-faced, simultaneously taking and giving life. Emphasizing that the ends of war are always sites of struggle, Nelson offers a ground-up take on political transition as Guatemalans find creative ways forward, turning ledger books, technoscience, and even gory popular culture into tools for making sense of violence, loss, and the future.